WAIMATE LAND SALE.

Patea Mail, Volume V, Issue 414, 5 April 1879, Page 2

WAIMATE LAND SALE.

(To the Editor of the Patea Mail. Sir, —May I draw the attention of your readers to the last specimen of parental government with which we have been favoured. I notice in a Wanganui telegram that the Taranaki Waste Lands Board have priced the Waimate lands at £5 per acre for cash, and £lO for deferred payment. Truly we do not at all resemble the child spoilt by being spared the rod; there is a desire to chasten us which scarcely, I fear, springs from love.I should have thought that the very ridiculous fiasco of the sale of the Stratford Township might have drummed a glimmer of common sense into the heads of the Waste Land Board; but no, they have the glorious faculty which distinguished the Bourbon family, 11 they learn nothing, and they forget nothing.” Added to this, they have a personal rancour against everything and everybody this side of the Mountain, an enmity which wo could afford to despise, were it not that we have a foe in the' country south of us. Between these two ; we seem to be like the man doomed of old to be torn asunder by wild horses,but it will take better teams than Wanganui or Taranaki can show before our limbs part—still, under such circumstances, it is hard for the sufferer to judge favorably of the merits and beauties of the steeds which are striving to dislocate and rend him asunder. The Taranaki Board alleged as one of its silly reasons for the strangulation of Stratford by absurdly high upset prices, that “it wished to keep out foreign speculators.” Well, it kept them out, there is no doubt about that, and domestic speculators also' —-but how wonderfully the wind has veered round now ! Is not charging a bona fide settler twice as much as the speculator, rather playing into the hands of ontside' capital ? The deferred payment selector on Waimate should be more greatly favoured by us than on any other block. He is not only a real settler,hut the bulwark of our settled lands ; against the rebels ; to him in holding the post of danger should be the ma d of honour and of careful What do we find ? That the lahddabbling capitalist can stroll down Lambton Quay or Devon Street,- while the locks of the deferred payment selectors (slain by the occupation clause) are waving in the breezes of Wairaate—on top' of a pole, in a Maori kianga. As said the southener in the American War, “ Allow me to welcome you with bloody hands to a hospitable grave !”—I am,&c., WHITE THORN.